Basically, a place for me to say whatever the hell I want to. Maybe some of it shall be entertaining for you? Enjoy!

Thursday, 7 April 2011

Ponies. Yes, ponies. (This only gets worse, by the way.)

Yeah, I know, I said I was going to do a continuation on the whole "what I believe" (melodramatic title FTW!) thingymegig, but then I realised that my blog was totally becoming an uber-serious political blog similar toa certain someone.Now, don't get me wrong - I like politics and stuff as much as your average, er, political person... (can't really say Mr Average Joe likes politics!) but I really don't want to gain the reputation of being a dude who'll always talk about the big world-changing problems. Now, I will be coming back to the whole "ooooh I think this should happen blah blah" thing later, but for now? I'm gona go all 'and now for something completely different' on y'alls arses.

So, ponies. Not just any old ponies, though, I'm going to talk about a certain cartoon involving ponies. Specifically, I'm going to be talking about the TV series 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic'.

Yes, thats right, 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' is incredibly popular amongst men. On Youtube at least (where episodes are commonly found), statistics show that the TV series is most popular amongst males aged between 18-24/25-35. Comments for 'My Little Pony' related video's are filled with people saying "I'm 20 and I'm unashamed of watching this", "Oh God, what have I become?!", etc etc.

Yeaaaahhhh...

There's more. 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' has gained a significant enough popularity with this audience that multiple fan sites have popped up, such as PonyChan(in similar context to the popular 4Chan website), and Equestria Daily, on what appears to be this very site, Blogger (although the url lacks the whole .blogspot thingy that everyone else has).

Why has this show gained such an odd cult-following? It's not exactly like other popular cartoon series in which the older fans have at least some semblance of the demographic said show is trying to pull (for example, a lot of guys still say they loved 'Dexter's Laboratory' as a child... understandably, that show was awesooome!). What we're talking about here is a not insignificant number of people being attracted by a show that is completely outside of the target audience. Not only that but we've even got freakin' memes coming around now based on this show. Like, people who hang around on /b/-type memes. Memes! Of a TV show for little girls! Coincidentally I am now using italics to emphasise every key point in my blog! It makes me ranting about some completely inconsequential crap look dramatic! (yeah, thats right, pulling out the bold words, biatch.)

Oh dear God.

So, anyways, back to ponies. (One has to wonder how the hell do you get to the point in your life in which you write a blog about ponies.)

There are a lot of things to contemplate here. I'm not actually the first one to try and analyse the growing popularity of 'My Little Pony: Friendship of Magic'. Previously mentioned Equestria Daily has been keeping a continuous monitor of the show's popularity, and web-culture site Know Your Meme has an entire articleon the growing phenomenon. They've pretty much covered everything about its growth, and what kind of influences the show has had and stuff, so what I really want to do is figure out a) just how the fuck did this happen? and b) what kind of atrocities might happen in the future because of this?

Right then, firstly, the ultimate question to everything: why?
Well, having had a bit of a sniff around, the common trend that tends to draw people in appears to happen in 3 different steps:

A typical example of a troll being damned.

- First, a perfectly sane and normal troll of the interwebs stumbles across some kind of reference to 'My Little Ponies', and notices that its strangely popular, not with little girls, but with fellow trolls. He (note: not 'she', in this instance I invoke Rule 30 of the internet) then goes and finds the first episode of the show and starts watching out of curiosity. Immediate reaction is "wtf is this gay crap?"
- Second, troll starts getting insnared about 3-5 minutes in. Initial "wtf" reaction is eventually replaced with "well I guess the animations are pretty well done..."
- Third, the troll has finished watching the show. By this point they have forgotten about any technically-driven praises of the show and are loving what they see because of the characters, setting, etc. Troll by now has a favourite pony, has replaced the words "everyone" and "someone" with "everypony" and "somepony" (respectively), and will commence an all-nighter watching the rest of the currently 20-odd shows on Youtube. Troll is no longer a troll - troll is now what is known as a 'brony'.

So, from my analysis (remind me why I'm analysing this again?) it appears that 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' is a well-laid trap: the good quality of the animations acts as bait for the unsuspecting troll, and the characters and charm snare him in, by which point he has no escape.
It's a terrifying fate for any troll.

Next question: what is going to happen with this growing army of bronies (brony's?) in the future?

The worst case scenario.

First things first, its really worth getting the good news out of the way - bronies are not dangerous, at least on the level of "they're probably not going to hunt me down, brutally rip out one of my lungs and then block the air passage to my other lung with it." type dangerous. Reason? Bronies are known to wanting to emulate the methodologies of 'My Little Pony', that being a policy of friendship, love and kindness. The worst that they will try to do if you really provoke them to the point of no return is "tolerate and love the SHIT outta you."

A much more dangerous prospect, however, is not the threat of one's annihilation, but rather one's assimilation - it is far more likely that you yourself will become ensnared by this show.

These guys are nothing compared to 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic'.

For you see, thats the real threat of this phenomenon - the internet, this cold, perilous, unforgiving paradise is being attacked by these ridiculous notions of 'love' and 'kindness'. Worse still, for the first time, the trolls are losing. The trolls of the internet are being converted. Lets consider this for a second - many of these trolls will also come under the banner of Anonymous. Anonymous, whom have crippled Scientology, aided the Middle Eastern Revolutions by hacking government sites, taken on the likes of HB Gary, and even stuck its middle finger up at the US government, is now under threat by a little girls show; 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' has been likened to Boxxy,the internet phenomenon that caused all-out civil war within 4chan, the generally-accepted home of Anonymous. While 'My Little Pony' is nowhere near as far-spread as Boxxy was at her prime, MLP is still growing, slowly but surely. Not only that, but MLP also has significantly more videos, and new episodes are released weekly - those ensnared by the show are more likely to remain with the show, instead of drifting away and forgetting about it, as happened to Boxxy.

Basically? I'm totally trollin' on your arsesThis show could potentially bring about the end of Anonymous and the trolling community as we know it.

So I implore you, dear readers (well, possible 'reader' singular but whatevs) - beware! A new threat is upon us and it is in the guise of magical ponies! Don't get ensnared by it like I already have! Though, if your really curious, here's the first episode of 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' for your viewing 'pleasure':

So until next time (I swear I might do something more serious next time!), you've been reading The (really) Random Babbling of a Slightly Odd Student! Thanks!